During the past year, I've started using Notion to organise both my personal and professional life. I discovered it accidentally while looking for a tool to manage my side projects and now I use it as my wiki, social media calendar, to draft documents, store random bits of information and manage both my blog posts (even this post is written in Notion first) and conference talk submissions.
When I started working for myself fulltime, I was so excited for the freedom and flexibility I could have. No rules, no restrictions, no routines. I could do whatever I wanted, when I wanted and no one could tell me otherwise. But it didn't take me long before I realised I was a little lost and not getting anything done. I'd spend several days vegging out on the couch and then have to stay up until 3am to meet a deadline. Then I'd sleep until midday the next day and the whole cycle would start all over again. So I decided to implement a routine. It took me a couple of goes and over 6 months but I eventually made progress with this, and I found that instead of feeling restricted because of it, I felt better than when I'd just been doing whatever I felt like.
During the past couple of years, I started focusing more on myself and when I burnt out last year I decided to put myself first. Since then I've taken on so many new responsibilities, adventures and stressors, but since making the decision to put myself first I've been in a much better place mentally and emotionally. By making conscious decisions about what I devote my energy to and by not letting myself feel bad for spending time on myself, I'm not only in a better place mentally, but I'm happier than I've been in a long time and truly enjoying my life.
These days your’re expected to manage several different aspects of life and at the same time keep on top of it all. Now the first thing you need to remember is to know your limits, it’s all too easy to take on too much and before too long you end up crashing and burning. I’m not going to cover that now because that’s an entirely different topic, but make sure you know where the line is, because that’s not something you want to cross.